Has anyone tried this

[mondo50m]

I was on another laser build site and one of the members there stated that he used a piece of DVD (cut in a small circle) to replace one of the mirrors on his laser and he said it worked as well as the real laser mirror. Has anyone else tried this and what are your results. If this works it could be a cheap solution to not having spare mirrors.

Milt

[Tweakie]

That may work as a mirror in a laser light show but I doubt it would last more than a few seconds with an 80W CO2 setup.
What may work is a disc cut from one of the ally platters from an old hard drive but I would not want to put money on it lasting well.

Tweakie.

[mondo50m]

I apologize, he used the disc from an old hard disc drive.

Milt

[Melody-gweike]

Well, a mirror only costs $20. But this try seems interesting.

[pontiacg5]

Some HDD platters are ceramic. Usually very old hard drives. If you try to use a ceramic platter it may crack or even explode when you hit it with the laser.

You'll be able to tell ceramic platters from aluminum platters when you go to cut them "into small circles." It's really easy to scratch aluminum platters too, just look at them funny and they'll be scratched enough to be useless as a laser mirror.

Also, while aluminum may work its not the most efficient way. You can defiantly expect to loose more laser power to aluminum mirrors than proper CO2 mirrors. How much extra loss is probably a guess, but there will be some.

Polished copper would probably work better than aluminum too.

[miljnor]

where are these 20 dollar mirrors?

[Rodney Gold]

We bought 9 replacement mirrors for my Shenui machines from Shenui , they were a princely $22 each .. Running both machines for 8 months full time and we havent had to replace a mirror yet.

[miljnor]

how about lenses?

[Exsecratio]

If you wan the best go for RMI or II-IV, if you want a lens from China they are all pretty much produced by a small number of companies so flip a coin

best wishes

Dave